


once, we were together

by thir13enth



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, F/M, allura and shiro are exes, and no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 15:44:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14548038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thir13enth/pseuds/thir13enth
Summary: (or, the five stages of breaking up)They hold each other’s broken pieces, but they still can’t complete each other.





	once, we were together

_i._

At first, Shiro tells himself to not be surprised, that he’d better be ready, because he knew —  just by the way her lips curve into a bright smile when she sees him, just by the way her eyes sparkle when he speaks to her, just by the way she whirls around when he calls her by name — that this was bound to happen.

He knew it all from the start because it felt like he was replaying a time of his life in the past, except that this time he was watching.

He’s watching two people fall in love, watching them lean in — close, close, closer, and even though he knows they’re going to kiss, he still holds onto some _irrational_ hope that she’d pull away but —

The kiss doesn’t last that long, but just long enough for him to question if he were dreaming, blink, and then realize that he, again, isn’t. And he lingers not that long, but just long enough for her to notice him with the corner of her eye, pull away from Lotor, and call out to him:

“Shiro— wait!”

He turns his eyes away, quietly stepping back out into the hallway as unnoticed as he had almost stepped in, but he can’t help the long exhale that passes through his lips. He shakes the image out of his head a couple of times and strides forward, heading to his quarters because he doesn’t trust himself to process this maturely out in the open.

He hopes she doesn’t run out to the hallway or follow him or catch up to him because he really doesn’t need her to act like she cares because he actually _does_ want her to and it would be really bad if he started believing that she did.

“Shiro!” she calls again, and then again, weakly, “Shiro.”

He walks faster, focusing on the sound of his steps and ignoring the sound of her hurried breath and quick steps behind him.

She catches him as he slides his cabin door open.

“Shiro, please.”

Her voice is so close.

“I can’t talk right now,” he breathes, stepping into his quarters. He doesn’t bother to turn on the lights, heading straight to the edge of his bed and sitting in the dark. He keeps his head turned down to the floor, propping his head up with his hands on his knees.

She stands just outside his door, keeping it open with her arm. She stands just underneath the frame, the light from the hallway shining a bright angle of white onto the floor, her shadow stretching long between his feet.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He exhales out sharply. “No,” he scoffs, more at himself. “Don’t apologize.”

He gets it. She’s moved on. He just thought he would have by now as well.

“He’s good for you,” he tells her. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

She stands there for a little while longer before she steps in, walking quietly over to his left and sitting to his side, keeping a careful distance apart.

He doesn’t object. A part of him wants her to be there. Just like how it used to be.

Just like how he still wants her to be.

“Shiro.”

This must be the hundredth time she’s said his name in the last five minutes. She says his name so soft, so gentle, he doesn’t think he can hear his name from her lips like that once more without losing it.

She touches his shoulder, and the breath catches in his throat.

“Talk to me,” she asks of him. “Please.”

His fingers press down harder on his temples. The cool metal tips of his right hand feel so much cooler than his head. The fingernails of his left hand dig into his forehead. He hesitates.

“I know we’ve talked about this before,” he finally replies. “I know I shouldn’t be upset.” He inhales, exhales. “But I am,” he admits. “I _am_ upset and I can’t help it.”

She swallows. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she tells him.

She sounds like she cares so much that he almost looks up at her. But he resists. He knows meeting her eyes would hurt him — it would remind him of the last time she told him she loved him.

“I didn’t know you were there.”

He holds back a scoff. So _what_ if he was there? Does that mean she still watches him from the corner of her eye? It almost sickens him that she thinks of him while she pursues _him_.

“Why would it matter at all that I was there?”

“I thought we were alone,” she explains. “I wanted to be careful because this is all so recent and—"

He doesn’t want to hear anymore.

“Just _go_ ,” he spits out, closing his eyes and covering his face with his hands.

“Shiro, I—”

“Just leave.”

And so she does.

He waits for the click of the closed door before he crumples into his knees, eyes shut tight wishing he had never seen a thing.

 

_ii._

He doesn’t see Allura at all anymore.

Ever since he saw her kiss Lotor, ever since she tried to apologize to him afterward, ever since he sent her out of his quarters and resolved to never see her again, he only sees Allura when he absolutely must.

If he has information to relay to her, he’d ask someone else to do it — sometimes he’d have to plead a little bit, but Hunk was often more than helpful. If they needed formed teams for a short mission, he’d turn immediately to his left to work with whoever was next to him — and he would never stand next to either Allura or Lotor.

Dinner isn’t a problem either — sometime between when he was lost and returned to the ship, their tradition of team dinners fell apart, but now Shiro is more than grateful he can choose an isolated time in the middle of the night to eat something, and moreover he can scan for any voices of those already in the kitchen to decide whether he should turn back to his room.

And as long as he kept his ears open, he’d never bump into either of them at all. They were always together. And when they were together, they were always talking. Sometimes she’d giggle, sometimes he’d laugh, but no matter what, if he heard either of them, he would turn the next corner to avoid passing by or switch tasks and find something else to work on while he waited out their presence.

They were _always_ talking. How the hell was there so much to talk about? Was this the way that it was when _he_ was with Allura, and he had just never noticed because they were so in love?

He shakes the questions out of his head. No, he’s thinking about her again.

For however little he saw her, he thought about her a lot.

He sighs deeply, pulling himself out of bed. He can do something with this time. If he was going to get over her, he had to start somewhere.

His mind goes on auto-pilot, and with nothing concrete to do, he does the first thing he always does when his emotions cloud over him. His feet take him to the closet, his arms pull an old shirt over his head, his hands reach for shorts, and before he knows it, he’s already out of his room, turned left and headed straight for the training room.

The training room. Yes, that was always good. He could sweat out the tension in his body. He would probably run faster and longer with a lot to sort out in his mind. He would last through more reps, heavier weights, tougher circuits.

Of course, this is his first mistake of the day.

The moment he walks in, he hears a thud and a clink of the heavy bag, and he looks up to see who’s throwing punches — and meets her eyes.

She’s all the way at the far end of the room, but he can see her so clearly. Her steel blue eyes momentarily unfocused from her training, the light sheen of sweat over her brow, the magenta glow of the marks under her cheeks, the stray strands of hair sticking to the nape of her neck.

They watch each other for a split moment. She takes a breath, pausing her set. She wipes her forehead with the back of her forearm, her opposite arm swinging back hang by her hips. He falls backwards a half step, as if forgetting he needed to be elsewhere. But she’s already caught him, and she’d know he was avoiding her, so he forces his eyes away and indiscriminately walks toward the first machine he sees.

It’s a treadmill, and he’s ever so thankful it faces the window so he can look at the stars and not at her, ever so thankful he won’t hear her grunts and her breathing over the sound of his running.

He doesn’t even warm up. He’s not thinking clearly and his only priority right now is to run out all the shakes in his muscles. He starts off on a full sprint, and maybe that’s not the best decision because only three minutes in he’s tiring out and his breath doesn’t surface. But he can’t falter. He knows that if he slows down, she’ll see that something’s off — but damn him because suddenly he realizes maybe he’s overthinking it and that she won’t even notice because she’s _completely over him_.

Fuck.

He came here to escape her, his mind, but he can’t. He just can’t, and he thinks the most about the last words he said to her, about the last words he _could_ have said to her instead.

Just leave, he said. Just _leave._

What should he have said instead? And hasn’t he dwelled on this question before? How could he have expressed everything he was feeling, explain everything he was doing in one sentence?

_I still love you._

But it’s that, and it’s so much more. It’s that he wants everything to go back to how it was, before they found more differences than similarities between them, before they started to question at all if they were together for the wrong reasons, before things started to crumble and slip through the cracks of his fingers and he could do nothing to stop it from falling apart.

It’s that, and also that he wants her to be happy, but happy with _him_ rather than _someone else_.

Now he’s out of breath. He slams the stop button with his palm, and he decelerates with the treadmill until he comes to a full stop. By now, he’s fully resolved. He has to apologize, he has to explain, he has to tell her, tell her _now_ because it’s too heavy on his heart to keep inside anymore.

But this is his second mistake of the day — deciding he needs to say sorry.

Walking towards her feels like the most natural thing he’s done in a very long time. He’s never spent so much time away from her intentionally, and even though keeping space from her was always the right thing to do, he had never felt so stilted, so restricted.

But now, striding quickly to the opposite side of the training room to meet her, he feels life seeping back to him as he comes closer to her.

And then once it’s very clear that he’s coming to her and not the punching bag next to her, she straightens her back and wipes her brow of sweat before meeting his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Allura,” he apologizes. He reaches out to touch her shoulder.

And this — he only realizes much _much_ later — is his third mistake.

 

_iii._

It’s as if she’s been waiting for him all this time.

“Let’s talk,” she says.

He doesn’t expect this. All he wanted to do was tell her he was sorry, tell her that he’s still working everything out and that he misses her so _so_ much. But she’s giving him more than a tired look and exasperated sigh. She _wants_ to talk to him, and he thinks it’s an opportunity to redeem himself.

Is it a bad sign that his heart skips a beat? It is a bad sign that for however serious this is, he is more than willing to spend time, any kind of time, with her again?

She ungloves her hands, and still with tattered wraps around her fingers and wrists, she rests her hand over his hand on her shoulder, settling over his hand securely. Her hand is so warm.

She looks up at him and sighs. “I’ve been thinking about you, too,” she confesses softly.

And what more would he want to hear from her? There’s a sick unhealthy knot that twists deep in his stomach when he thinks of her thinking about him.

She’s thinking of him? What about him? How he’s a better kisser than Lotor perhaps? How he knows the spots that make her moan better?

He wants to smile but he knows his mouth will curve into a sinister shape if he lets it. He’d gleam with haughty pride — and he hates it. This isn’t like him at all.

“I’m being unfair to you,” she says. “It’s not right that I’m doing this when you’re right here.”

No. It isn’t fair at all, he wants to reply.

“No,” he replies instead. “It’s nothing to do with you. I’m not making this easy.”

She frowns. “You still matter to me,” she tells him. “I care about you, and I don’t like how this has changed what we have.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to that. After they broke up, he didn’t think there was anything they had at all.

“I’m calling things off with Lotor for now,” she continues. “You’re important to me, and if this is going to affect you, I don’t want to make things worse. I want us to be able to work together and I don’t want to hurt you while we’re still trying to figure out our dynamic.”

He hesitates. “Is that what you and Lotor agreed on?”

“I haven’t told Lotor,” she replies simply. She looks off to the side, out the window at the stars. “He’s off on a short trip, and I decided not to go with him.” She turns back to face him. “I needed some time for myself.”

“I…” he says, but no sound comes from his lips. He doesn’t have the strength to vocalize anything, but he’s too conflicted to figure out what to say anyway. Is he happy to hear she still cares about him? Is he relieved she’s distancing herself from Lotor on his behalf? Is he angry at himself for messing it up so bad that she felt like she needed to cut out her own satisfaction in life?

“I miss you a lot,” she tells him. “I don’t see you as much anymore, and we don’t talk like we used to. And I understand. I know this is hard, and I’ve never gone through this before with anyone else. I just want to fix us as much as possible.”

There _is_ an easy fix for them, he thinks. She could just come back to him and everything would go back to —

“I still love you,” he chokes out. It’s not pretty, but at least he got it out.

She looks down at his hand, still on her shoulder, and her hand on top of it.

“I know,” she says, and she takes his hand, clasping it between both of her hands. She looks down at their interlaced fingers. “And I want to keep as much of you that I love that I can.”

She can have all of him. As much or as little as she wants, as long as she wants him — that’s all that matters.

“I know it sounds selfish,” she continues slowly. “That I want as much as I can of you. I’m asking for more than I deserve, probably.” She looks back up at him, her eyes meeting his.

He shakes his head, his eyes never leaving hers.

“No,” he murmurs. “You can have as much of me as you want.”

Then he leans in and kisses her.

 

_iv._

He kisses her softly. Gently. Because the words he has aren’t enough. She can have him. He is hers.

When he pulls away, her eyes are closed.

“Oh, Shiro…” she whispers over his lips. Her eyes flutter open, and he sees longing in them.

She’s just as confused as him. She searches his eyes for an answer — anything to remind her that what she is allowing is wrong and that this will make everything all the more painful — but there’s not a single part of him that cares about anything more than being with her.

“I want all of you,” she breathes. And she closes the distance again, her hands taking his jaw and pulling him down to meet her lips. Her fingers pull at the short hair on the back of his head and her hips grind deliciously against him.

So then he takes her to his bed, and the rest is automatic.

Their clothes still come off in the same order as they always did: her shirt, his shirt, his pants, her pants, her bra, his boxers, her underwear. She still loves the way he drags his tongue between his legs, and she still grips the bedsheets tight as she climbs. She still wraps her legs around his waist when he enters, and she still pants breathlessly when he goes fast, she still releases a moan when he goes deep.

He wants this to last for long as it can. He knows this won’t happen again, and he doesn’t want it to end.

She must know it too. There’s a different rhythm in their hips, almost melancholic, and while the sounds and the smells and the feel is all the same, even as the magenta marks covering her body glow bright white and even as he watches her enjoy his every stroke — there is still an unmistakable effort to not say ‘I love you.’

“Shiro…” she cries.

This is the most she will give him.

“Oh, _please, Shiro_.”

He thinks as long as she says _his_ name — that’s all that really matters.

 

_v._

The starlight shining in through the window blends purple hues onto her brown skin. His eyes follow the curve of her waist line, then the edge of her arm until he reaches the pink swirls over her collarbone and up her neck. He takes in the details of her face — her round nose, her pointed ears, her soft cheeks — before he meets her eyes.

She watches him in the same way. She knows just as well that _this_ isn’t happening again.

He takes a slow breath in, reaches his fingers up to lift her chin.

“Remind me why we aren’t together again,” he asks her, his thumb tracing over her bottom lip.

She sighs, and he feels the warm exhale on his thumb. She takes his wrist and pulls it away, pressing his hand down onto the mattress with her hand.

“We’ve talked about this before, Shiro,” she says then.

“I know,” he replies. “But everything feels so right. You don’t think so?”

She swallows. She doesn’t answer that question.

“Things were getting in the way, remember?” she reminds him. “We started arguing because we didn’t agree on what to do and it trickled into how we felt about each other. I didn’t want what was going on to get in the way of the team, and I didn’t want what was going on to further ruin _us_ , what _we_ had.”

He’s heard this before. But he realizes now that he actually needs her to explain something else.

“And Lotor?”

She turns her head into the pillow. “That was also a mistake.”

“Also?” His voice breaks.

She opens her mouth, but no words come out.

“We really shouldn’t have done this,” she finally says, a moment after.

He already knew all of this was a mistake. He shouldn’t have gone to the training room in the first place, and even if he did, he shouldn’t have talked to her, and even if he did, he shouldn’t have touched her, kissed her, _made love_ to her.

He already knew all of this was a mistake, but something about the fact that she said it made the realization hurt more. Maybe because he was still hanging onto some loose hope that things could still go back to the way things were. Maybe because he thought that he still had a chance.

“Shiro, I love you,” she suddenly says. And when he thinks that maybe he’s dreaming the words, she says it again. “I still love you. So much.”

She looks up at him, and in the dark, he can see a white gleam reflecting off her glazed eyes.

“But I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to hurt you again, and I would never forgive myself if I started resenting you again because of the way this war is working out,” she blurts, her voice cracking.

“And I don’t know what I’m doing with Lotor. Maybe I missed you. Maybe I thought he could help me forget about you.” She shudders as a tear rolls down her cheek. She wipes off with her hand. “I don’t want any of it anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t think straight.”

This is when he realizes that maybe she is the same as he is. She knows nothing more than him about what to do about their broken hearts — how to mend them, how to live with an empty hole in their chest, how to move on when they were still in the same place — and he stifles back a cry.

How could he have been so angry with her? How could he have not realized that she was keeping it together on the outside while still crumbling on the inside? How could he have ignored her all this time, brooding over his own feelings, when she was hurting just as much as he was?

Shaking, he takes her in his arms and clutches her tight, so close as if to never let her go. She tucks her face into his chest and he feels hot tears trail from her cheek onto his skin. He rests his chin on top of her head and lets his own tears fall to the pillow.

He cries because he knows none of this is going to fix anything. He cries because there is nothing he can do to fix anything. He cries because nothing about the way he feels about her has changed and he doesn’t know when it will. He can’t help her because her problem is him, and she can’t comfort him because she’s the one hurting him.

They used to solve everything together but this, for the first time, is something they need to solve apart.

Minutes, maybe hours, pass in each other’s trembling arms. When there are no more tears left to cry, she lifts herself up and out of his arms.

She kisses him one last time, and that’s when he knows it’s over again.

**Author's Note:**

> honest to god when I started writing this, I had no idea what was going to happen. I’m sorry, I thought it was just going to be a fic about shiro getting over allura and lotor but then things took a turn and I lost control of the plot. sorry. 
> 
> to yell at me  
> tumblr: @ahumanintraining  
> twitter: @napsbeforesleep


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